By his own reckoning, Joseph Sepp Blatter was accepting a modest $1 million a year in 2010 for his performance as "the most powerful man in world sport".

As he told a journalist, he was "not ashamed" of the fact. When compared with salaries paid by big businesses, Fifa wages were at a "school kids" level, said Mr Blatter.

There is a reason for that. You cannot buy shares in football's global governing body. Mr Blatter talks fondly of Fifa's "family", but the affairs of a multi-billion dollar enterprise depend on votes allotted to 209 national associations. The 79-year-old Swiss president - for life, it now appears - recognised the advantages early in his inglorious career.

He talks a good game. Spread the gospel; spread the wealth; take the revenues from a $4 billion World Cup tournament to ensure that a kid on a Pacific island gets boots, pitch, coaching, and the chance to be the next Maradona. A lovely notion. In reality, ruthless patronage has followed. With it has come the kind of corruption that attracts the attention of the US Department of Justice.

That fact merits questions. Why has it been left to Americans to use alleged abuses of their banking system as a reason for long-overdue action? Simple: no one else dared. Equally, though 14 indictments might sound impressive, Fifa has been through all of this before. Yesterday, Mr Blatter was still deploying his "bad apples" defence, still maintaining that he can't be expected to keep an eye on everything. Later he promised, with no trace of irony, to "fix Fifa". He had votes in his pocket to endorse his temerity. Why did he have those votes? A naive question.

The Americans will not be displeased if their investigations into a (for them) minor sport cast doubt on Russia's 2018 World Cup bid. For the rest of us, the deaths of 1,200 migrant workers in Qatar as that country prepares for 2022 have turned football, and Mr Blatter's "family", into issues bigger than a bungs-to-blazers tale. With the usual immaculate timing, Scotland will play Qatar at Easter Road on Friday. Attendance is optional.

Where football's corruption is concerned, we are all, if fans, complicit. Before the Brazil World Cup there was hand-wringing over the sight of poor people being driven from the streets by riot squads defending a country's "image". Once the first ball had been kicked, all was forgotten. In South Africa, during the previous tournament, Fifa had its own courts created to deal with local "troublemakers". Protests from players, associations, broadcasters and fans were, let's say, muted.

As Mr Blatter made plain yesterday, Fifa is vastly rich and powerful thanks to television. He implied - though his meaning was scarcely veiled - that this is a boat the Fifa delegates had better not rock. The sponsors such as Visa and Coca Cola, contributing perhaps one third of earnings, understand TV's "reach" perfectly well. The players in search of that next big contract know what a World Cup is worth. And still countries queue to sacrifice billions for the honour of hosting a series of mostly indifferent matches.

England, with its 49 years of hurt, continues to try its hand with the Fifa charade. An astonishing £21m was spent on the effort to secure the 2018 contest. The only result was the humiliation of, variously, David Cameron, Prince William and David Beckham as they were lied to repeatedly by delegates whose votes had been - let's say - otherwise secured. These distinguished individuals were taken for fools. Yet only now does the Serious Fraud Office "assess" evidence. Why? In case London banks were, again, a sluice?

Those who don't care for the sport are liable to despair at the indignation expended on a tediously ubiquitous game. People are starving, wars take their bloody toll, migrants die, diseases and earthquakes challenge complacency. All of that is true. But Mr Blatter is not wrong, either. He sits at the heart of a global industry that has, surreal as it sounds, turned a simple recreation into an issue with geo-political consequences. And it's crooked.

You could start with the Swiss. They too are busy, belatedly, with reforms, a fact that might explain their desire to help the Americans out with arrests. You could also observe that Fifa has made its home in Switzerland since 1932, that it is only one of around five dozen "sporting bodies" to enjoy Swiss hospitality, and that the habit of applying the same tax treatment to Fifa as is applied to local fishing clubs might just explain a few things.

One thing would be a tax bill - for an organisation that is not yet obliged to publish its accounts - of $75.3m on a gross income of $2.32bn in the four years before the 2014 World Cup. That "gross" derived from fully $5.7bn in revenues, even after Brazil was granted a princely $453m to ease the pain of a catastrophic national performance. How does Fifa work? The last tournament saw it pay $358m in prize money. "Staff costs" in the four years leading up to the final came in at $397m.

Is Fifa's corruption problem a revelation? If so, someone should tell the BBC and ITV, who bought their broadcast rights for 2018 and 2022 last winter - the sum agreed is "confidential", of course - while the death toll rose on the building sites of Qatar and Russia toyed with Ukraine. Mr Blatter's latest coronation at Sonnenberg in Switzerland cost $30m, according to the Financial Times, in "travel, accommodation and organisational costs". But with $2.43bn in TV rights money - less bribes - for 2014, peanuts remain peanuts.

The outrage of football fans is predictable and comical. One of two things, or both together, will end this circus. Either we stop watching, or cease to participate. Either would do. The big sponsors will only take fright if their risible branding efforts are treated with the disdain they deserve. In brutal reality, the World Cup will not survive if the Europeans and South Americans refuse to tolerate the farce. Without them, no one else will watch.

Mr Blatter has been cunning about that. Behind his piteous noise over bad apples there is a moral challenge to the rich, white world of overpaid players and broadcasting billions. What of Africa? What of Oceania? Does not football owe his rough-and-ready development programme some sort of loyalty? The boy from the barrio and the kid from the islands have rights, surely, in the Fifa family?

Uefa, the European governing body, will meet in Berlin next week and do a fine version of righteous indignation. A withdrawal from Fifa remains on the wrong side of likely, even from countries entirely aware that football is watched, globally, because of their players. The best European candidate for reform yesterday, after all, was a Jordanian prince, Ali Bin al-Hussein, from a country with a habit of torturing prisoners. Forgive me if I'm not inspired.

Watch your local junior side instead. Watch kids in the park. Not every tackle will be clean, but it will be the closest thing to purity left in football.